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A Site Warhol Would Relish

Justin Kan is a co-founder of Justin.tv, which invites anyone to film daily goings-on  continuously  and to broadcast them live through the site.
Credit
Jacob Woodward

JUSTIN.TV, a San Francisco start-up that provides live video programming on the Web, wants to make you a star as a “lifecaster.” No singing, dancing or storytelling skills are required — only a willingness to broadcast every moment of your quotidian existence in real time. That’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week, wherever you go.

But can a business be built upon an audience limited to those willing to watch excruciatingly real “reality TV”? After all, shows like “Survivor,” “Kid Nation” and “Big Brother” are tightly edited highlight reels that squeeze life into a compact entertainment package. Lifecasting, on the other hand, shows life in unabridged form, programming without a thematic concept, without a casting director, without an editor, without anything in the subject’s life that is much different than the audience’s, other than the willingness to be on view.

The technologists at Justin.tv have figured out ways to make video streaming on the Internet inexpensive but haven’t gotten much further than that in puzzling out a business.

When the four co-founders, whose average age is 23, began investigating the costs of distributing video online last year, the major companies that dominate the business of serving video streams quoted charges that would have cost a start-up about 36 cents a user for each hour of video viewed. That’s too expensive to make an advertising-based business feasible. The Justin.tv team pushed the cost of streamed video to less than a penny an hour per user by building its own software that would work with Amazon Simple Storage Service, an inexpensive offering that is open to any Web developer.

With a cost structure that makes video streaming all but free, they thought, they surely could follow YouTube’s example, letting the Crowd supply the programming and the Crowd figure out what’s good. If only it were so easy. YouTube traffics in very short entertainments; lifecasting does not. The Crowd, wise though it may be, probably does not have infinite patience to watch thousands of hours of lifecasting chaff to find a single grain of wheat.

This month, after seven months of beta-phase broadcasting, Justin.tv formally declared that it was open for business to one and all. In its first five days, the company said, it created 18,500 hours of video and pulled in 500,000 unique visitors. What those statistics do not show is how long anyone stuck around. In a sampling I did last week during a weekday, only 44 viewers, on average, could be found at each of the eight most heavily visited channels.

Before Justin.tv began, other live video sites like Stickam and Ustream.tv, had appeared, hosting live shows supplied by anyone wishing to broadcast longer-form video, unconstrained by YouTube’s 10-minute limit. But no other video site had ventured to make lifecasting the centerpiece of its branding.

Lifecasting — as a form of conceptual art — has been around for quite a while. Jennifer K. Ringley’s JenniCam ran for seven pioneering years, from 1996 to 2003; Ms. Ringley was willing to allow the Webcam to stay on, even during times of intimacy. Once the boundary was crossed separating the private and the public, however, lifecasters who followed couldn’t hold an audience’s attention just by crossing the same line — it’s been done. Justin.tv has decided to adopt a PG-13 version of lifecasting: nudity is deemed “unacceptable.”

To start Justin.tv, Justin Kan, one of the co-founders, began his own lifecasting last March. (Whether in the office or at home in bed, he seems to spend an awful lot of time staring at a computer.) Justine Ezarik, Justin.tv’s second volunteer and an attractive young woman, has become one of the site’s most popular lifecasters. When Ms. Ezarik explains to the world every nuance of her just-completed purchase of a sandwich at an airport shop — or when she invites us to watch her watch television for hours in a hotel room — she left me wondering whether her show was a parody of lifecasting and whether she, like Stephen Colbert, never breaks character.

Stewart Alsop, a partner in the venture capital firm Alsop Louie Partners of San Francisco, which invested in Justin.tv last summer, is aware of the limitations of the site’s current lifecast offerings. The future, he hopes, will bring more and better choices.

“If there are 6 billion people in the world,” he said, “imagine one million people broadcasting live, 999,000 of whom are boring — but the other 1,000 are really interesting.”

All of Justin.tv’s live video streams are archived, and the best snippets are culled by each show’s owner as “episodes” or by any viewer as a “highlight.” The problem is that once Justin.tv archives, edits and labels these clips, the resulting “best of” shorts become indistinguishable from YouTube videos, vitiating the supposed power of live broadcasts.

Justin.tv’s lifecasters now have the technical ability to broadcast live from anywhere that has wireless Internet service. When Mr. Kan began lifecasting, he had to carry a 15-pound camera and 7-pound battery pack. It was only marginally lighter than the giant satellite dish that Al Franken wore on his hat when he pretended to be a one-man correspondent-and-video crew in “Saturday Night Live” sketches in the 1980s.

Subsequently, the Justin.tv team was able to redesign its system so that a special camera is no longer needed. A tiny Webcam, easy to affix to a shoulder strap, hat or eyeglasses, can be connected to any lightweight Windows laptop with an Internet connection. A 3-pound laptop is still too heavy, however, to be carried everywhere one goes, day in, day out — assuming, of course, that the lifecasters have a destination other than their own home or office.

The current roster favors a stationary camera pointed at themselves seated and immobile, participating in a text chat session that unfolds on half of the screen.

ANDY WARHOL, were he still with us, would enthusiastically embrace lifecasting, not because it enables everyone to become world-famous for 15 minutes, but because the medium is perfectly suited to Mr. Warhol’s taste.

“I like boring things,” he once wrote, and his experimental films deliberately tested his audience’s appetite for tedium. His 1963 classic, “Sleep,” was a black-and-white silent film that had a single actor, single scene and single plot point: the poet John Giorno sleeping — for 5 hours and 21 minutes. When it was shown for the first time in Los Angeles, an audience that was 500 strong began shrinking even before the 45-minute close-up of Mr. Giorno’s abdomen was complete. Still, 50 people lasted for the full 321 minutes.

Those masochistic souls would love Justin.tv.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.